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Pitching with Pritch

Busy time for TV remotes

By Larry PritchettPast PCHS Activities Director

Another busy week with lots of activities to watch and what a wind up to the NCAA football year with Alabama and Notre Dame competing for the National Championship, and that BCS thing working again for another year. Or maybe it didn’t work very well at all. There was a lot of bias when you think about either Notre Dame or Alabama in this game. Alabama from the SEC and a lot of people got tired of hearing how “good” the SEC is, but that conference has produced the National Champion for the last number of years. So at least the team that wins that conference is pretty good. Notre Dame is another story I think. It is a global school. It doesn’t belong to a football conference so they don’t have to share revenues with other schools. That helps their bottom line financially. They have their own television deal with NBC and that is really a good bottom line filler. They took home about $6 million from the BCS Championship game. You have to admit that the Irish must be a great business school. A lot of fans, some writers and some coaches didn’t think that the ND schedule was tough enough to keep the Irish towards the top of the polls and it wasn’t hard to find football people who felt there were other teams that would have been a better team to play for a National Championship. The game itself would tend to prove that theory in a hurry. The Irish defense held teams to 10 points the entire season, but Alabama had 28 at half time. The game was over in the second quarter. The clicking that you heard Monday night was remote controls changing the channel to everything but professional hockey. A.J. McCarron’s (Alabama quarterback) girlfriend got more hits on twitter than Notre Dame put on her boyfriend. Matter of fact, the best hit on McCarron came when he and his offensive center, Barrett Jones, disagreed on a call at the line and McCarron got into Jones’ face and Jones gave him a shot to the chest to back him up a little. When it was all over, the hype for the game was way too much for the kind of game it turned out to be and that happens in a lot of championship encounters.Creighton Excels On one of Tim Miles– (Cornhusker men’s head basketball coach) first interviews on television here in Nebraska, he made a comment that the Husker’s basketball team was the only show in town and if you follow some of the local blogs, you find that the Creighton fans didn’t take too kindly to that statement. Well, the Jays are off to a 15-1 start and ranked 13th in the nation after they whipped Drake last Tuesday 91-61. In those 15 wins is also a drubbing of the UNL team. They have a great player in Doug McDermott who was a first team All-American last year as a sophomore and is playing at the level again this year, but they also have a strong cast of other outstanding players to go along with him. One of them is Ethan Wragge and he is a three-point shooter deluxe. He was the scoring leader Tuesday night with 22 points. Wragge made two two-pointers. He had six three-pointers. The two-pointers were the talk of the game afterwards. He just doesn’t shoot that many. Wragge has made 211 baskets in 94 games for Creighton and 189 of them have been three-pointers. The most two-pointers he has made in a game is three against San Diego State last season. The Jays shot 64 percent for the game and couple that with Drake missing 22 of their first 29 shots, the game was out of hand early. The win moved the Jays to 15-1 and 4-0 in Missouri Valley Conference. There might be at least two shows in town.RG3 ACL Damage It has been a discussion item on the sports talk shows all week. Should the Washington Redskins have allowed Robert Griffin to continue to play in their playoff contest against Seattle when he was visibly hobbled by a leg injury. RG3 commented after the game that he wanted to play and it wasn’t but a season ago when the Bear’s Jay Cutler got hurt and didn’t play and the professional world was outraged that he sat during a playoff game. You have heard the saying, “He is better on one leg than some guys on two” and that might be true with Griffin, but I think I would like to have him have a career that lasts more than one season if at all possible. It was reported on Wednesday that the damage was more severe than first thought and you don’t really know what that means. Players come back from severe ACL injuries and Adrian Peterson proved that this year, but nothing is guaranteed. I heard someone on ESPN say, “You see a lot of good young running quarterbacks, but you don’t see many good old running quarterbacks.” Let’s just hope that the doctors can reconstruct and keep him on the field for few more seasons.